With 21 million concurrent players, Roblox hit Grow a Garden is bigger than half of Steam combined, but players are already flooding another, far weirder competitor

If you're plugged into the Roblox system, you'll know that over recent weeks one game has been smashing records. Grow a Garden, which is best described as gacha gaming's answer to Stardew Valley or Farmville, racked up more than 21 million concurrent users earlier this month.

That's reportedly not just the most-played game in the history of Roblox, but the highest recorded total in the entire industry. It's helped make Grow a Garden the top-ranking Roblox game for revenue, and the fastest game to reach one billion lifetime plays.

That's come with its downsides. As with any massively popular game, Grow a Garden has collected its fair share of haters. A game mostly about waiting for plants to grow, it's hard to fight off the 'watching paint dry' allegations, but Grow a Garden has a dedicated enough audience to fight its corner, especially when some players have blamed it for Roblox's recent server issues.

Its success also, however, means there's not really anywhere to go but down. That 21 million player peak hasn't been matched since, and in fact Grow a Garden has been struggling to clear half that – still an enormous number of players, but perhaps not quite the industry-clearing figure it's managed in the past.

Perhaps that's down to the newest challenger on the Roblox scene. Players have been watching the gradual rise of a game entitled 'Steal a Brainrot', which has started to reliably clear one million concurrents – barely a patch on Grow a Garden, but enough to clear the concurrent records of almost every single game on Steam.

Riffing on both Grow a Garden's name and its luck-related mechanics, this new challenger tasks players with purchasing increasingly valuable creatures – Brainrots – and storing them in their bases. Players can steal their opponents' Brainrots, and have to defend their own bases with a variety of weapons and traps in order to keep their own bestiaries fully stocked. I'm not sure how one 'wins' beyond having the most valuable collection, similar, I suppose to a billionaire with a garage full of expensive cars they never drive.

Admittedly, both of these games (and presumably many of their competitors) are built around keeping players locked in for as long as possible, with repeating rewards or surprises signposted to encourage just a little more play. At least, I think that's the case, because researching Roblox YouTube for this story has given me what certainly feels like a big old case of the Brainrots myself.

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